Inbox Love Speakers

Mikael Berner

CEO and Founder, EasilyDo

Mikael Berner serves as the CEO and Founder of EasilyDo Inc. Previously, he served as a Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nuance Communications Enterprise Division. Before being promoted to this role, he served as the General Manager of Nuance’s On Demand Division. Prior to that, he co-founded and served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of BeVocal, Incorporated. Prior to founding BeVocal, he held various technical and product management roles. He is an active angel investor who enjoys helping founding teams grow their businesses. Mr. Berner holds a Masters Degree in Engineering from Cornell and a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.

Alex Devkar

Co-founder and CEO, Conspire

Alex Devkar is co-founder and CEO of Conspire, which is a smart professional network built on top of email. It tells you exactly how to get the best introduction to whoever you want to meet — a customer, employer or investor. Prior to that, he was an intellectual property attorney at WSGR and a researcher in computer science at Stanford.

Elena Gorman

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Atlassian HipChat

Elena Gorman is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for HipChat, a leading team communication app built for business. HipChat is part of Atlassian (makers of JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket and many other amazing products). Drawn to software from an early age, her marketing career has focused on connecting teams with the technology to work smarter.

Before joining Atlassian, Elena led online marketing for the container-visualization platform now called Docker.

A fifth-generation San Francisco native, Elena spends most weekends balancing nap schedules (her daughter’s) with family hikes in Western Marin and the occasional griping about the SF housing crisis.

Amit Gupta

Outlook Group Program Manager, Microsoft

Amit is the Group Program Manager for Outlook at Microsoft. He and his team focus on team collaboration experiences in Office 365. He is currently working on the “Office 365 Groups” initiative that brings together people, information, and apps across the Office suite, enabling a more efficient way for teams to work together. As part of this initiative, he also focuses on evolving the email messaging experience in Outlook, to make it the preferred collaboration tool for teams to use every day. Prior to starting the Office 365 Groups initiative, Amit worked on multiple versions of Skype for Business, Lync, and Communicator client releases. He drove the user experience for desktop and mobile clients, directory integration, IM, Presence, and Group chat solutions, along with integration of the real time capabilities in Outlook & Office apps. Amit holds over 20 patents in the communication space and is obsessed with building great end-user experiences.

Mick Hagen

Co-founder, Mainframe

After dropping out of Princeton University, Mick founded Zinch, an ed-tech company connecting students globally with opportunities in higher education. Mick helped Zinch grow to an international, 8-figure revenue-run-rate startup that served millions of students and 800+ colleges & universities worldwide. After six years, Zinch was acquired by Chegg (CHGG, NYSE) for $45mm. Mick is currently re-imagining enterprise communication (specifically email) with his latest startup, Mainframe, where he recently closed more than $3m in venture funding from top European and American investors. Mick is an active angel investor and advisor in the startup community. Mick has been a speaker at Techcrunch Disrupt, TedX, Founders Forum, Latitude59 and others. He’s a mentor to various accelerators including Techstars, Ignite, Barclays, StartupWiseGuys and CyLon. A few of his recent angel investments include Degreed, Andela, Dice.fm, Lystable and Good Audience. Mick currently lives in London and can be reached on Twitter, @mickhagen.

Jason Henderson

Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft

Jason is a Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for the Outlook, Outlook.com, Exchange, and Office 365 Mail, Calendar, Contact, and Groups Developer Platform, which he has led for the past eight years. During this time his teams have designed and built the Exchange Web Services, Exchange Web Services Managed APIs and the apps for Outlook extensibility model. Jason was a key driver of the apps for Office app model and Office.com store as a distribution mechanism for 3rd party apps. Jason is extremely passionate about empowering app developers to leverage the rich mail, calendar, contact, and task data inside of office, and democratizing the distribution and usage of apps by users and organizations. Prior, Jason worked on Outlook Web App and Microsoft Mobile Information Server, an early platform for bringing e-mail and other productivity services to WAP devices. Jason has been involved in building e-mail and collaboration services and developer platforms in some form or another for the last twelve years.

Matthew Izatt

Product Manager, Gmail at Google

Matthew is the product management lead for Gmail’s mobile and work efforts. Matthew has led recent efforts to redesign Gmail on Android, across mobile and tablet, and to ensure the best of Gmail is available to everyone—no matter their service provider. Similarly, Matthew is leading the Gmail team’s efforts to ensure that Google Apps for Work is the best mail service for any business.

Prior to Google, Matthew spent extended time designing, selling, and deploying cryptographic security solutions at Certicom. Earlier in his career he observed the dot-com era boom and bust.

Cathy Marshall, Ph.D.

Adjunct Professor, Texas A&M University

Until the lab’s closing last year, Cathy Marshall was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. She is currently an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Texas A&M University. Before joining Microsoft, Cathy was a hypertext researcher at Xerox PARC at the dawn of the Internet era. She has given keynotes at WWW, ACM Hypertext, Usenix FAST, TPDL, and numerous other meetings and conferences.

Olof Mathé

Co-founder and CEO, Mixmax

Olof Mathé is the co-founder and CEO of Mixmax which is upgrading email to the 21st century. Prior, he was an entrepreneur and worked at Inkling, Skype and McKinsey. Olof grew up in Sweden and finished his engineering degree in France. He created Art Hack Day, a global computer arts hackathon.

Dave McDowell

Senior Vice President and General Manager of Communication Products, AOL

Dave McDowell is Senior Vice President and General Manager of AOL Communication Products including AOL Mail, the AOL app, AOL Desktop, AIM, Alto and Kanvas. He is based in AOL’s office in Palo Alto, CA.

Dave joined AOL from Yahoo, where he spent nearly a decade in product and marketing roles with Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Small Business.

Dave holds a MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BS in Business Administration from Miami University.

Alexander Moore

CEO, Baydin

Alex is the CEO of Baydin, an email productivity company. Baydin makes software that combines AI and behavioral science to ease the burden on overloaded emailers. The company is best known for its wildly popular Boomerang email scheduling extension, which has been downloaded over a million times and brought the company to profitability 6 months after exiting beta.

Alex previously worked at Analog Devices and graduated with Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from MIT. When taking a break from his email, Alex makes a Chicken Florentine that tastes like angels singing and is a rabid Alabama football fan.

John Rae-Grant

Lead Product Manager of Gmail, Google

John is a leader of the team behind the most widely used email service and clients on the planet. As the lead Product Manager for Gmail at Google, John has helped introduce such improvements as image proxying, the Gmail API, HTTPS-only security, and using machine learning for spam and abuse detection. John is highly active in groups of industry leaders working together to improve the email ecology through encryption, authentication, and interoperability. Prior to Google, John alternated between talking the talk (consulting) and walking the walk (founding start-ups) of technology leadership. Back in the cenozoic era, John began his career with a ten year stint at Microsoft, as part of the management team of Visual C++ and as the general manager of MSDN.

Javier Soltero

Corporate Vice President, Outlook, Microsoft

Javier Soltero is Corporate Vice President of Outlook where he leads the team responsible for the vision and strategy of the Outlook client and cloud service on all platforms. He joined Microsoft after the successful acquisition of Acompli, where he was co-founder and CEO for the 18 months leading up to the sale. He also has been CTO of SaaS and Application Services at VMware, co-founded Hyperic, the leader in large scale web infrastructure management software, and has held many other chief architect and senior engineering positions and many technology companies. Javier received a BS in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was born and raised in Puerto Rico before moving to the Bay Area, where he now lives with his wife Emily and their two children.

Adelyn Zhou

Former Growth Marketing Lead, Nextdoor

Adelyn Zhou is a seasoned growth marketer with experience at Nextdoor, Eventbrite and Amazon. She advises numerous startups, and is frequent presenter on marketing and business topics. Adelyn graduated from Harvard College and received her MBA from Harvard Business School.

Joshua Baer

Fellow, Return Path and Founder of Capital Factory

Joshua Baer spends all day worrying about email so that you don’t have to. He is an email marketing pioneer and the Founder of OtherInbox, which was acquired by Return Path in 2011. He has founded or invested in a dozen email startups and you can see his mark on about half of the email messages in your Inbox. Joshua helps people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. He brought together 20 people to form the Capital Factory, an early stage accelerator, to mentor and invest in tech startups. Joshua founded his first startup in 1996 in his college dormitory and now teaches a class at the University of Texas for student entrepreneurs. He received Computer Science and Information Decision Systems degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Austin, TX with his wife and three children.

Jared Goralnick

Principal Group Program Manager of Skype for Business, Microsoft

Jared Goralnick is the Principal Group Program Manager of the Skype for Business product at Microsoft, where he directs both the mobile applications (iOS and Android) as well as the overall strategy of Skype for Business. He also currently mentors at the Founder Institute in Washington, D.C. and in San Francisco, teaching courses on marketing, outsourcing, and partnering.

Before joining Microsoft, Jared also founded and ran AwayFind, a web application that addressed email interruptions. Additionally, he served as an Innovation Fellow to the US Department of Health and Human Services, lending an entrepreneurial perspective to multiple initiatives there. He had previously sold his technology productivity training company, SET Consulting, that worked with organizations like NTT, HP, NIST, and the FBI, and has served as the EVP of the Information Overload Research Group, Founder of Ignite DC, and as mentor at 500 Startups.